Supports to South African agriculture were stripped from the sector from 1994/95 to the end of the 1990s, and these domestic reforms were accompanied by the liberalisation of trade policies as border tariffs were reduced and export subsidies were eliminated under unilateral reductions that went beyond any mandatory requirements imposed by the World Trade Organisation through the Uruguay Round outcome. This was however somewhat balanced by the introduction of tariff rate quota regimes for several products and a system of (largely now ended) variable import tariffs. Roughly a decade after this considerable liberalisation, South African agriculture is at somewhat of a crossroads. There is a body of opinion arguing that this liberalisation has not helped the sector and therefore a reversion to protectionism is required. The objective of this research is to clinically analyse the individual agricultural imports by sector to assess as to how practical in terms of policy space this option may be given the current levels of commitments to multilateral trading partners through the WTO and bilaterally through commitments such as the Trade and Development Cooperation Agreement (TDCA) with the EU and preferences granted to SADC.

This paper assesses the amount of ‘policy space’ available to increase the tariff protection to South African agriculture. The analysis takes account of the following:

• The World Trade Organisation (WTO) definitions for agricultural products are used;

• import data (expressed in US dollars) is sourced from the World Trade Atlas;

• applied tariff data sourced from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) Tariff Schedule; and

• South African bound tariff rates and tariff quota information from the WTO website.

The findings from the analysis conclude that in general the policy space available to South African agriculture is limited because of several reasons outlined in the paper.

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